Putting a serious effort into learning Italian in the classroom can make it possible to immerse yourself in the language when you visit Italy. Studying hard for an engineering interview lets you get a job where you’ll be able to practice a set of related skills all the time. Reading a scientist’s research papers makes you seem like an attractive candidate to work in their lab, where you’ll gain a much more profound knowledge of the field.
This isn’t just signaling. It’s much more about acquiring the minimal competency to participate in the real thing without being so disruptive that people will kick you out, so that you can learn better.
The ideal role of education, then, would be to give students that minimal competency, plus some safety margin, and then shove them out the door and into real-world practice environments.
You could imagine a high-school Italian class in which students learned in the classroom for 1-2 years, and all those who passed an exam were able to move to Italy for 3 months of immersion. Or a school that also functioned as a temp agency, alternating between schooling its students in engineering, programming, and math courses and sending them to do progressively higher-level work in real engineering firms. Or a programming course for middle-schoolers that started with classroom learning, and then grouped students into teams to develop video games which they would try to sell (and who cares if they fail?).
Real schools rarely work in this way, as classroom/on-the-job hybrids. If you’re a student, perhaps you can adapt your approach to educating yourself in this way.
That’s the crux of most of the education debates. In reality, almost nothing is just signaling—it’s a mix of value and signaling, because that value is actually what’s being signaled. The problem is that it’s hard to identify the ratio of real and signaled value without investing a whole lot, and that leads to competitive advantage (in some aspects) to those who can signal without the expense of producing the real value.
Absolutely. There are plenty, plenty of parasites out there. And I hope we can improve the incentives. Thing is, it also takes smart people with integrity just showing up and insisting on doing the right thing, treating the system with savvy, yes, but also acting as if the system works the way it’s supposed to work.
I’m going into a scientific career. I immediately saw the kind of lies and exploitations that are going hand in hand with science. At the same time, there are a lot of wonderful people earnestly doing the best research they can.
One thing I’ve seen. Honest people aren’t cynical enough, and they’re often naive. I have met people who’ve thrown years away on crap PIs, or decades on opaque projects with no foundation.
I know that for me, if I’m going to wade into it, I have to keep a vision of how things are supposed to be, as well as the defects and parasitism.
Learning feedback loops
Putting a serious effort into learning Italian in the classroom can make it possible to immerse yourself in the language when you visit Italy. Studying hard for an engineering interview lets you get a job where you’ll be able to practice a set of related skills all the time. Reading a scientist’s research papers makes you seem like an attractive candidate to work in their lab, where you’ll gain a much more profound knowledge of the field.
This isn’t just signaling. It’s much more about acquiring the minimal competency to participate in the real thing without being so disruptive that people will kick you out, so that you can learn better.
The ideal role of education, then, would be to give students that minimal competency, plus some safety margin, and then shove them out the door and into real-world practice environments.
You could imagine a high-school Italian class in which students learned in the classroom for 1-2 years, and all those who passed an exam were able to move to Italy for 3 months of immersion. Or a school that also functioned as a temp agency, alternating between schooling its students in engineering, programming, and math courses and sending them to do progressively higher-level work in real engineering firms. Or a programming course for middle-schoolers that started with classroom learning, and then grouped students into teams to develop video games which they would try to sell (and who cares if they fail?).
Real schools rarely work in this way, as classroom/on-the-job hybrids. If you’re a student, perhaps you can adapt your approach to educating yourself in this way.
That’s the crux of most of the education debates. In reality, almost nothing is just signaling—it’s a mix of value and signaling, because that value is actually what’s being signaled. The problem is that it’s hard to identify the ratio of real and signaled value without investing a whole lot, and that leads to competitive advantage (in some aspects) to those who can signal without the expense of producing the real value.
Absolutely. There are plenty, plenty of parasites out there. And I hope we can improve the incentives. Thing is, it also takes smart people with integrity just showing up and insisting on doing the right thing, treating the system with savvy, yes, but also acting as if the system works the way it’s supposed to work.
I’m going into a scientific career. I immediately saw the kind of lies and exploitations that are going hand in hand with science. At the same time, there are a lot of wonderful people earnestly doing the best research they can.
One thing I’ve seen. Honest people aren’t cynical enough, and they’re often naive. I have met people who’ve thrown years away on crap PIs, or decades on opaque projects with no foundation.
I know that for me, if I’m going to wade into it, I have to keep a vision of how things are supposed to be, as well as the defects and parasitism.